Reintegrationism

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The term reintegrationism (reintegracionismo) describes a linguistic movement in Galicia, Spain, which aims to reunite Galician and Portuguese into a single language.

[edit] Controversy and common positions

Presently, there are two primary views in Galicia about the Galician language:

The isolationist view considers Galician and Portuguese to be two distinct languages. Isolationists therefore favor differentiated rules of writing and spelling that are almost exactly the Spanish ones. This view is held by the majority of public organizations in Galicia and the Spanish central government.
The reintegrationist view considers Galician to be a variant of a Galician-Portuguese linguistic diasystem. Reintegrationists support the use of spelling rules similar to the ones used in Portuguese-speaking countries.

Reintegracionismo is a cultural as well as linguistic attitude. Reintegrationists tend to believe that the Galician dialect (or Galician language) rightfully belongs to Lusofonia, being in fact a variant of the language known worldwide as Portuguese and spoken by more than 200 million people in eight countries. They wish to have stronger cultural and economic as well as linguistic ties with the Portuguese-speaking world.

Galician is part of a linguistic diasystem which presently has two norms: one from Portugal and PALOPs (Portuguese-speaking African countries), and the other from Brazil, also a former colony of Portugal. Some reintegrationists have proposed a third, Galician norm, known as AGAL. Others believe Galicians should simply use standard Portuguese; this is also the end goal of some who currently defend AGAL as a provisional norm to ease the public transition into the use of standard Portuguese.

Consequently, the reintegrationists think that linguistic organizations such as the NOMIGa (Normas Ortográficas e Morfolóxicas do Idioma Galego), arbitered by the RAG (Real Academia Galega) and ILG (Instituto da Lingua Galega) are inadequate, as these organizations tend to consider the Galician accent as definitively "contaminated" by Spanish.

The last reform of the ILG-RAG norms, completed in 2003, conserves the most prominent Spanish characteristics of Galician: namely, the Spanish Ñ instead of the Portuguese NH, the Spanish LL instead of LH, and the Spanish-derived suffixes -ería, -ble, and -ción. Also, the lexical choices tend to be in agreement with the ones used in Spanish.

As a transition norm, the Galician Language Association (AGAL) and other groups use AGAL, a Portuguese-Galician norm very similar to standard Portuguese. AGAL spelling uses standard Portuguese spelling rules such as NH, LH, and the suffixes -aria and -vel, but also uses the termination -çom instead of the Portuguese -ção or the Spanish -ción.

Other groups, such as the Language Defense Movement (MDL), use both AGAL and the standard Portuguese spelling norms, while the AAG-P (Associação de Amizade Galiza-Portugal) and the IFG-P (Irmandades da Fala da Galiza e Portugal) opt for the common norm for Portuguese as decided in the Lisbon agreement of 1990.

These are not the only groups who use these "reintegrated" norms, and the wider use of such norms has led to them being recognized recently as acceptable in courts of law.